Diaries and Dramas

/ Lisa / 4 Comments

A few weeks after my mother died, my sister and I went through her things.  This involved scaling a gigantic mountain as my mother was a hoarder.  At one point I heard my sister sobbing and found her holding my mother’s diary.  It was an odd journal, full of stories of things that hadn’t happened, cruel comments about her children that made no sense, and serious signs of instability.  But all my sister saw were the horrible words written about her.  At the time we had a bonfire outside and so I took the diary, plus more of my mother’s that I found, and threw them onto the fire with broken-hearted fury.  And then I went home, gathered the diaries that I had kept since I was nine years old, and burned them, too.  There was a rage inside that words could so hurt.  I didn’t ever, ever, want something I had written to hurt another person so deeply. 

It probably wasn’t smart to make such an important decision that impacted not just me but siblings as well, when none of us were emotionally stable.  And over the past few years I have had brief moments of regret. 

And over the past few years I have never again kept a diary. 

Here’s the thing though.  Most writers keep some sort of notebook.  Something that holds bits of over-heard dialog, descriptions of someone passed in a street, ideas for stories, and random thoughts on writing.  I keep having this little nagging voice whispering to me that I should be writing life down.  Added to that, I know there are many types of diaries.  I know people who keep weather journals, nature journals, bird journals, and even one who keeps a running tab on river levels.  So if I really wanted to keep a diary, there are a lot of forms I could choose. 

Yet I keep going back to that moment when my mother’s words devastated my sister.  And I believe that if I started a diary again, the words would be false because I would mentally be editing them out of fear of hurting someone.  And that kind of writing is dangerous because there’s the possibility of the writing becoming a lie.  I find myself in this quandary of wanting to keep a journal and yet not knowing how to make it both honest and painless.  This is a common tightrope for writers to walk.  The work needs to be honest.  A friend described this beautifully when she said she was using a pen name to remove the inner critic that sat on her shoulder whispering, ‘what would your mother think?’.  But a pen name and the anonymity that brings isn’t an option when it comes to a journal.

Fiction is easier.  I have written stories where family members have been represented in characters, and not always favorably.  Do I worry about offending a family member?  Heck no.  I can always say, ‘it’s fiction’.  That excuse doesn’t exist for journals. 

I went into an office supply store this weekend and stood before the variety of notebooks thinking how much I would like to take on those blank pages.  I haven’t felt that desire to journal in a long time.  But as I reached for one, the fear came back.  I believe journals are important, especially for writers, but I haven’t found a solution to writing honestly without possibly breaking my son’s heart some day.  Even though I’m not my mother, and even though I want to record my writing life, not his life, is it worth the risk?  Some day I’ll find the balanced answer, but obviously it’s not today.

Throwing Away Words

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Claire was a classic pianist and hermit.  A tall elegant woman with high cheekbones who wore jeans, logging boots, old plaid shirts, and suspenders.  A published writer who lived in the woods surrounded by twelve dogs, all drop off’s she’d given a home to.  An extremely intelligent woman who had, back in the 1940’s, her own radio show.  When I knew her she had disdained connections with the world.  No phone, no car in her later years, no family.  I did her weekly grocery shopping, taking bags into a house that was merely a shelter as she spent her time outside.  I grew up wanting to be her, a hermit in the forest, with dogs, music, pen, and paper. 

There’s an old adage that a writer should never throw anything away.  That you never know when a cut paragraph or unfinished story might be needed in a new piece of work.  The other day I found myself overwhelmed by paper.  After all, just how many versions do I need to keep of a particular manuscript?  Obviously not ten.  I decided to keep one draft, plus the final finished piece and toss the rest.  In the midst of this cleansing, I came across a large pile of Claire’s writing.  Drafts of manuscripts before they were published, where she had written notes to herself in faded pencil in the margins.  Stories that she had never published.  Beginnings with no end, scraps of paper with ideas, scraps of paper that were more like journal entries.  Any writer reading this knows exactly what I’m talking about.  How often do we jot things down to save for later, and then see those pieces filter down into the boxes? 

I debated about throwing away the pile.  Claire was gone, I knew I would never do anything with her ideas, and in some pages the writing was so faded it had become ghosts of words.  And yet, I’d always loved her handwriting.  And she had this very wicked humor that was still alive in some of those jotted thoughts.  And finally, I realized, who was left to remember her, to appreciate the lifetime of seeking words, if not me?  And so I kept her pile, repacking the paper along with my melancholy for a woman long loved and still missed.

But with my own papers, I have to admit I did toss a lot.  Not all.  But I noticed that mine were printouts from the computer.  There was nothing personal on them.  Well, of course, those pages are all my words and my voice and my story drafts.  But they miss the human touches of Claire’s papers.  Years from now when my son is overwhelmed by paper and cleaning up after his parents, will he see me in those computer generated papers?  Possibly through my stories, but most definitely not the way I found Claire again. 

Then again, I do have that box of abbreviated ideas, snippets of dialog, observations of people, scraps of unfinished sentences.  I was going to toss it, but maybe I need to keep it after all.  For my son you know.  Really.  That’s the only reason…

Interview With Poet and Novelist Mary Mackey

/ Lisa / 4 Comments

Mary Mackey, author of the poem When I Was a Child, very graciously agreed to be interviewed.  After struggling to come up with questions that she had not been asked thousands of times, I finally retreated to my writer’s group and another group of friends, who supplied me with questions they would like to ask.  The questions and Mary’s answers follow.  I’d like to thank Mary here publicly for being so gracious.

1. Does your muse flow easier after tragedy, comedy, or exultation?  Mary: Tragic events seem to drive me toward poetic inspiration with the most force.  Poetry is often a way that I try to make sense out of the world.

2. Who, or what, most inspires your poetry?  Mary: My poetry is inspired by many things, none of which I can predict in advance.  Nature is a great inspiration.  I do a lot of hiking and canoeing with my husband.  Also, for many years I have been traveling to the tropics.  The jungle never fails to inspire me with its beauty a complexity.  Love also inspires me to write poetry, as does death.  I think the most concise answer to this question is: strong emotions of joy, fear, love, and terror inspire me.

3. Do you write more about what you have already experienced or what you wish to experience?  Mary: I almost always write about what I have already experienced.  Sometimes I change the experience slightly in the interst of writing a better poem.  On some occasions, I write about fictional experiences and people.  For example, in my forthcoming collection Sugar Zone (which will be published by Marsh Hawk Press in Fall 2011), I have created a fictional character named “Solange” who weaves her way mysteriously through many of the poems.  Solange is me/not me: muse, dream, a being who came out of my imagination.

4. Do you work a piece in one sitting or over days?  Mary: I do the first few drafts in one sitting.  Then I spend a long period of time revising.  Sometimes it takes years before I feel that a poem is complete.

5. Do you find specific settings or circumstances that are more conducive to writing poems over fiction?  Mary: I can write poetry anywhere – on a beach, in a coffe house, sitting in a tree.  Fiction demands a more stable environment because I need access to a computer, the Internet, and my research materials as well as long periods of time when I am not interrupted.  In contrast, I usually write my poems on a piece of paper using a pen.  When I am writing poetry I don’t need electricity or wi-fi, just a small window of peace.

6. Do you have a sense when a piece is ended or do you revise the ending?  Mary: I usually write well past the end.  Most of the time, I end up cutting the original ending and writing a series of new ends which I also cut and revise.

7. Do you experience any interaction between novel writing and poetry?  As in one inspires the other, one leads to a desire to write the other, etc.  Mary:  This is a particularly interesting question.  On several occasions, I have written a poem which later turned into a novel.  For example, a number of years ago, I wrote a long poem about a Civil War battlefield (which you can find in my collection Breaking the Fever, Marsh Hawk Press 2006).  This poem, which is entitled Lynchburg, was the seed of my two Civil War novels: The Notorious Mrs. Winston and The Widow’s War.

8. What’s your favorite dessert?  Mary:  Chocolate cake!

9.  What’s your opinion on how the publishing world is changing due to public platforms, hand held readers like Kindle, the direct access an author has to the internet, etc.  On a related note, do you think this is changing the previous perception that self-publishing meant works of a lesser standard?  Mary: Changes in the publishing world are going on so rapidly right now that no one, not even the publishers themselves, can grasp all the implications.  At present, due to the economic downturn and the rise of e-readers and public platforms, publishers and bookstores both are in a difficult situation. It’s probably not an overstatement to say that many of them are fighting for survival.  At present, I think there is still a lot of skepticism about self-published works, primarily because they have not undergone a rigorous selection and editorial process.  This may change in the near future, but I think it’s too soon to tell.  Meanwhile, the primary problem with self-publishing is getting your readers to know that your book is out there.

10. What question about writing would you like to answer but no one ever thinks to ask?  Mary:  Question: “Why do you write?”  Answer: I write because I love language, I love telling stories, and I love giving my readers poems and novels that they will enjoy and which, perhaps, will in some way change their lives.

Mary finished the interview with: ‘If you would like to learn more about my novels and poetry and sample some of my work, you are invited to visit my web page: www.marymackey.com  I can also be found on Facebook.”

Again, I would like to thank Mary for taking the time to answer our questions.  There are many things here that give me food for thought, not the least of which is how wonderful it is that writers make themselves so accessible.  Now I’m off to the library to find some of her novels.